This is the conclusion to a 3-part series on The Green Hornet (2011). This part focuses on the film's play with masculinity and heteronormativity. You can find part 1 here. And part 2, here.
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My previous exploration, survey, and playful theorization on the cultural politics that surround the figure of Kato and Britt Reid in the The Green Hornet (2011) suggest that we cannot reduce the epistemology (the film’s “meanings” and our desire for a particular meaning) to the level of visual representation – the “finished” product given-to-be-seen on the screen. While certainly perceptible that The Green Hornet (2011) engenders positive screen representations of Asian American men, this “reclamation” of representation – to be more specific, a reclamation of a viable and virile yellow masculinity – the film also forces us to consider how the global and transnational connections that pervade both the films narrative, production, and source material necessitates a reconsideration of yellow and white masculinity.
My previous exploration, survey, and playful theorization on the cultural politics that surround the figure of Kato and Britt Reid in the The Green Hornet (2011) suggest that we cannot reduce the epistemology (the film’s “meanings” and our desire for a particular meaning) to the level of visual representation – the “finished” product given-to-be-seen on the screen. While certainly perceptible that The Green Hornet (2011) engenders positive screen representations of Asian American men, this “reclamation” of representation – to be more specific, a reclamation of a viable and virile yellow masculinity – the film also forces us to consider how the global and transnational connections that pervade both the films narrative, production, and source material necessitates a reconsideration of yellow and white masculinity.
It is well documented that following the cancellation of the second iteration of The Green Hornet television series in ‘66 (an unintended performance of failure perhaps?) Bruce Lee moved to Hong Kong where he was able to attract screen exposure with The Kato Show. Following The Kato Show, he was picked up by the Hong Kong movie industry – then known less for stellar and spectacular production and more for fast production cycles. Just as we might suggest rhetorically – in lieu of a close reading of the “source” material which may suggest otherwise – that The Green Hornet mythos operates through exploitation and containment of the Asian “other”, the production of these mythos vis-à-vis the movie screen, simultaneously produces an Asian American cultural subject, actor and agent (e.g. Bruce Lee) who is able to resist containment in the racist U.S. national imaginary. This Asian American cultural (and particularly, male) subject is able to resist the social death prescribed for him by escaping to the transnational and the global networks of cultures and kinships. This is to suggest that we must be mindful of the global production of meaning that operates in excess of the boundaries and imperatives (aesthetic, political, commercial) of American and Asian American cultural nationalism that we may place on the film.
Taking a transnational and global approach – an approach that necessitates attention to excess – towards The Green Hornet (2011) productively complicates the configuration of Asian/Asian American (yellow) masculinity. Here, I am not suggesting that a transnational approach allows a recuperation of “authentic”, patriarchal, Confucian models of Asian American masculinity. I want to be clear here that my reading of the film is not to provide answers and palliatives to the current questions of Asian American male masculinity, but rather to reframe the very issue and question of Asian American masculinity in a way that is not circumscribed by the terms of U.S. citizenship. Discourse that reduces the issue of Asian American masculinity to one of lack – lack of phallus, lack of language, lack of authority, lack of (female) property - often obscures how the construction of “lack” is produced through a hegemonic discourse of “normative” masculinity.
Might we reconsider this “lack” as one of “excess” instead? That is to say, Asian American masculinity (ways of being a yellow man) operates in excess of white hetero-normative masculinity, which in turn – perhaps due to typical Eurocentric insecurity of the other – constructs this excess as one of “lack”. Or in other words, Anglo-American masculinity is constructed as both universal and exceptional by configuring and containing “othered” masculinities as “lacking” in specific “racial” and “sexual” qualities. A transnational approach would certainly allow us to produce more insightful readings of Asian American masculinity – as a national construction nested within a global production of meaning and discourses- as “excessive” rather than lacking of white hetero-normative masculinity.
This is especially pertinent as the queer turn in Asian American literature asks us to consider how discourses of race are imbricated in discourses of sexuality rather than as an “intersection” of two separate discourses of identity. Interpretations of race are simultaneously interpretations of sexuality. And both have typically been isolated by the imperatives and boundaries of the nation-state, which may lead to some reductive readings. For example, despite the physical (quite handsome) presence and cultural capital that Chou brings to the film, his implicit foreignness – reinforced by Reid’s ignorance and his self-damning geopolitical faux pas – renders Kato both less than a man (“A small man”, teases Reid) and ineligible to participate in hetero-normative romance (i.e. Kato’s failed seduction of Cameron Diaz’s Lenore Case). To use David Eng’s oft-cited term, Kato undergoes a “racial castration” within the strict hermeneutics of the U.S. nation-state.
Furthermore the film makes clear with its emphasis on homosocial rituals and bonding, that the desire and taste for an Asian “other” is a male privilege, only for tongues of (white) men. And the film is able to discharge all the homoerotic energies between Kato and Britt Reid– their queer intimacy acknowledged by almost every character in the film– while maintaining a semblance of heteronormativity by displacing sexual desire for each other onto a female subject (both compete for Lenore’s affections irrespective of Lenore’s agency and her own desires). When neither man can claim Lenore, Reid resorts to a discourse of violence in order to expunge the anxiety over the sexual energy between him and Kato. In a Gondryesque one-shot, Reid and Kato slam into each other, breaking glass and throwing flying kicks, a romp that is as manly and masculine, as it is queer and deviant. It balances both the mainstream audience’s expectation of manly violence with their abhorrence and skepticism at man-love.
It is important to acknowledge how this rather deterministic reading interacts with the film’s theme and rhetoric of failure. As I have suggested, Reid’s failure as the (white) protagonist stems from his inability to contain his racialized “other”. I would extend this reading further and suggest that this failure of whiteness prohibits him from participating in the on-screen economy of heteronormativity[1]. In another scene of visual rhetoric, Kato hands Britt Reid a knock-out gas gun, an iconic weapon of the Green Hornet. Reid self-reflexively acknowledges the phallic symbol of the gas-gun – notwithstanding its presence in the source material – when he regards Kato’s gift as a jab at his lack of “manliness” i.e. his inability to fight on the same level as Kato.
The gas-gun, rather than fulfilling the superhero repertoire, represents for Reid his sexual inadequacy. This anxiety over his perceived “lack” – which opens him up to queer readings – is further emphasized in a later scene when he knocks himself out with the gas-gun (a failed moment of masturbation perhaps?) waking up a week later only to realize that Kato has changed his clothes while he was asleep.
If the film is oriented around Reid’s inadequacy as a straight white man, or perhaps the inadequacy of being simply a straight white man, this could suggest that his masculinity and race could be recuperated through the Asian body, through Kato. In other words, while the film’s rhetoric of failure and its transnational necessitates an emphasis on excess (particularities of The Green Hornet mythos rather than its universality), we must still be mindful at the possible containment by the transnational turn. In more words, the move to the transnational is itself fraught with problems; too often nation is conflated with nation-state, Asian-ness (or simply excess of whiteness) is identified with the growing might of the Asian economies. The figure of Kato is another prime example, at various iterations he has been racialized as Japanese, Chinese, or Filipino, which reflected not just the “excess” of the racialized Asian body, but also how national racial constructions are mobilized by the needs of the state’s military interventions and interests in Asia.
To the remake’s credit, Kato resists any of the film’s cultural imperialist urges. That is to say, while we identify Kato as an Asian subject/object, we know very little of him – his background, his backstory in the film. In this particular iteration, Kato is less an imperialist epistemological project on Asia, rather takes on the mores and fantasies of the exploited worker. We can identify in him is a semblance of class hatred that is masked and screened by his malaise and lament of being simply the nameless sidekick. Indeed, while the violence that Reid enacts on Kato is a catharsis of homoerotic energy – since Reid cannot be read as a heteronormative subject, he must deal with possible queer readings of his homosociality – we should consider what this violence means for Kato. For Kato, this opportunity to let loose on his “boss” could be read as an enactment of fantasy, the return of repressed anger and class hatred. He is, after all, a worker in Reid’s company, a “model minority” with a potential that is squandered by his servitude to Reid’s family (Britt hires him specifically to make him coffee).
My last point to make here about the queerness of Rogen’s The Green Hornet concerns another “excessive” character: Reid’s secretary and villain strategist Lenore Case. As reviewers have suggested, Lenore, played by Cameron Diaz can be read as an object of the male gaze. Indeed, the first time we meet her, she smiles at the camera for no reason. Yet despite Case’s status as a given-to-be-seen object, she exhibits a surprising agency in her refusal to be the object of Reid and Kato’s affections and competitions. This agency is undertaken in a rather tenuous situation. Britt Reid is her boss, her refusals of Reid’s advances endangers her job, but also endangers the invisible expectations of heteronormative romance that are threaded in our interpretations.
Moreover, she also refuses Kato’s advances, refusing to be part of any recuperation of masculinity (yellow or white) that objectifies her. However, her relationship with Kato should give us some pause. We must consider that Lenore is the one who initially reaches out to Kato, asking him out to dinner and drinks. Narrative-wise, this not only sets up Reid’s racial and sexual anxiety over an onscreen interracial pairing, it ostensibly signals to the audience Lenore’s attraction to Kato (why wouldn’t she be right, it’s Kato/Bruce Lee/Jay Chou!).
Lenore’s rejection of Kato then should not read as a jab at the inability of Asian men to get with the white woman, but rather signifies how Kato has misread Lenore’s desire for affiliation, as sexual attraction. That is to say, Lenore identifies with Kato in that both occupy a rather uncomfortable position to Britt. They are both workers, are both not white heteronormative men, which opens up their bodies to discursive violence and objectification. Kato reads this as a physical and sexual attraction, which ultimately disregards Lenore’s agency and attempts to re-inscribe her simply as a sexual object.
The relationship between Kato and Lenore then, forces us – men of color in particular – to consider how a recuperation of masculinity, as a pathway of resistance to the problematic of racial castration, must simultaneously address issues of female agency and desires. We, like Kato, cannot criticize white heteronormativity, the racist white love, on one hand, and the on the other, re-inscribe exclusive models of masculinity that depend on the objectification and consumption of the female body. When we speak of the plight of the castrated Asian man, we must be careful not to conflate “Asian” with heteronormativity when this is, and has never been the case – at least for those of us living in the United States.
In closing, I started out by exploring the multiple valences that The Green Hornet remake operates under – as a superhero movie, a transnational cultural production, a vehicle for Asian actors to break into the U.S. cultural market. My primary motivation was to reconcile the critic’s review with my own odd attraction and affiliation to the film. The Green Hornet remake is a rather odd and queer film that resists an exclusive interpretive experience. It forces us to interrogate and explore the presence of excess in order for it to “make sense”. Such a methodology places less emphasis on the given-to-be-seen, and allows us to consider the workings and workers behind the mask.
[1] For more, please see PopMatters Julian Chambliss’s critique of The Green Hornet in http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/135660-rebuilding-american-manhood/
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